I don’t know whether we can say that the Ngorongoro Crater Lodge is the best hotel in the world, the second best, or trailing in at number five. What I can say is that this is an outstanding travel experience which more than justified the bank-account emptying price tag.   more »

Lake Manyara National Park is a lush green strip of land between the water and the Rift Valley escarpment which provides the most dramatic backdrop. The reason why this land is so green is that most of the rainfall in the area occurs on the highlands just above the lake.   more »

From the moment we step onto the neat One & Only yacht in Male harbour, we are inside the Reethi Rah universe. Four stewards in smart white costumes greet us offering drinks. It is raining as we motor towards the island. We scramble onto the top deck and enjoy getting wet as the Indian Ocean opens up in front us of. An hour passes before we approach the harbour of Reethi Rah itself.   more »

You have to love the capital of a country which single-handedly held off the might of the Red Army, enjoys a drink without behaving like British morons, and has produced some of the hi-tech products which define our age.   more »

Arriving in Siem Reap, it's clear that Angkor is no longer off the beaten track. Multiple hotels line the main roads and tourist buses cause mini traffic jams in town. I was anxious that the main temple sites of Angkor outside Siem Reap would be overrun but fortunately our guide planned a circuit of the temples specifically to avoid the crowds. It did however, mean that we drew up to the Angkor Wat in the full glare of the midday sun.   more »

I’m always fascinated by ugly towns: Chongqing, Nairobi, Detroit, Dundee. They’re ugly because they are (or have been) centres of industrial-economic activity: working towns. They may not have a Hyde Park or a Champs Elysee, but if you scratch just a little beneath the surface of an ugly town, you’ll find hidden treasures, quirky stuff which doesn’t exist anywhere else. For example, next time you’re in Detroit, check out the Cadieux Cafe, one of the last places in the United States where you can play authentic Belgian feather bowling and enjoy a bowl of steamed mussels at the same time.    more »

One of our brilliant guides is standing by the sink-hole to hold on to each visitor while we look down. I am about half way down the queue. Everyone else has made it more or less intact and is now climbing the other side. I keep my penguin walk going steady right to the last step, and then start to feel my balance going. Instinctively, I push one leg out to balance myself, then realise I am going the other way. So I push back - right into the arms of our guide who grabs me with all the strength he can muster and utters a small cry of genuine concern. Without him there, I would probably have disappeared down that sink-hole forever.    more »

In a city which is know for its magical realism, the Faena Hotel & Universe is, in many ways the ultimate location. Just a few miles from where Borges wrote about fantastical other worlds - some fiction, some fiction within fiction - the Faena is almost certainly on another planet, although which one I’m not entirely sure.   more »

KB is driven mad by those documentaries on satellite TV about Rome, which constantly refer to 'the greatest Empire the world has ever known'. The worst offender recently was the bombastic Boris Johnson in his BBC series on the glories and grandeur of the Romans. As an educated, worldy, Asian-born scientist, KB finds this kind of casual, narrow-minded claptrap infuriating; and who can blame him? By the time Julius Caesar was rolling around the Dordogne, the great Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi had been underground with his Terracotta Army for over 200 years, having created what was (and is) really the 'greatest empire the world has ever known' - with a culture, arts and sciences far ahead of anything which existed in 'the west'.   more »

Before dinner, we head down to the ground floor for a stroll around Pudong. It’s all brand new, bright and shiny, big and bold - just across the river from the old town. This is where Shanghai is building its world financial centre. At the end of this century, if our species is still here, that’s almost certainly exactly what it will be. Old Europeans may not like what is being built in Pudong, these massive temples serving international trade and business. But I find it oddly comforting, this confident vision of the future. It’s certainly a lot better than the alternative.   more »